Visual Comfort Amelioration Technique for Stereoscopic Images: Disparity Remapping to Mitigate Global and Local Discomfort Causes

Abstract

This paper proposes a new disparity remapping framework to improve the visual comfort of stereoscopic images. The proposed framework adaptively remaps disparities of a scene according to different causes of visual discomfort. A linear disparity remapping is first performed in order to address visual discomfort induced by excessive disparities. This linear remapping changes the disparities of the scene to obtain an overall target disparity range. Then, a nonlinear disparity remapping process selectively adjusts the disparity of problematic local disparity ranges according to their contribution to the visual discomfort. The proposed nonlinear disparity remapping process enables us to minimize the loss in perceived depth range while further improving visual comfort. The effectiveness of the proposed disparity remapping framework has been successfully evaluated by subjective assessments of visual comfort and naturalness. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed remapping framework. More importantly, we show that the nonlinear refinement of disparity in problematic regions can efficiently improve visual comfort while maintaining the naturalness of the scene.